Article

How Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Sales

by Rick Delgado, Business and Technology Consultant and Writer

September 26, 2017

Artificial intelligence can help your sales efforts in seven ways.

Sales is tricky, even for humans. With all our creativity and intuition for how each other works, you’d think the art of marketing would be a task kept exclusively in human hands. However, recent development on the artificial intelligence (AI) front means that to experience success as a business, that’s just not the case.

We’re talking about more AI developments than helpful Siri giving you the quick answer to win an argument or telling you about the weather. AI systems have changed the way businesses operate, especially when allied with Big Data and deep learning tools. Whether a business follows a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) model, AI systems are a major driving force for growth – and here’s how they can grow your sales.

1.Managing Calendars

With an AI system managing calendars and appointments, your sales team can heave a sigh of relief. Want to schedule a meeting? The system will look for other employees who have the free time and suggest an appointment, along with alternative times that may also work if unexpected delays come up. This means more efficient collaboration – and certainly a lot of saved time – so there’s no more manpower wasted on trying to get the right people into the right rooms at the right time. This leaves more energy for employees to do their jobs well.

2.Taking Notes

One of the most important and tedious parts of a meeting is taking notes. Whether the meeting is an audio call, videoconference, or face-to-face meeting, minute-by-minute notes are important. With a complex AI system listening and taking notes, you can be confident that no important points are missed. It will also help analyze factors such as customer engagement and read customer behavior to let you offer a personalized touch to your communication.

3. Prediction

With an AI system, you can build profiles of customers based on their behavior and habits. These profiles allow the system to predict what people need or would like to buy. Salespeople can base their pitches on these insights and successfully convert a lead into customer.

4. Targeting

Big Data leaves a lot of information to sift through – however, it’s still needed for marketing. Instead of targeting large pools of people for marketing, AI systems work in conjunction with Big Data to help businesses find and target a very specific set of people – ensuring that their marketing efforts are more effective. What an AI system can do in seconds, your analyst will take minutes to complete. By working together, the information can be sorted through faster and offer more accurate results.

5. Driving Engagement

AI is being used to show people what interests them the most, instead of showing news in a chronological manner. By studying user interests and behavior, AI is being used to make newsfeeds selective and smart.For example, it’s all about combining human behavior and digital smarts to optimize and organize your sales processes. For example, Facebook uses AI to make newsfeeds more personalized and interesting for each user. This revamped format for news delivery increases sales opportunities and provides businesses with more time to convert a customer.

6. Extra Selling Hours for Each Sales Rep

When a business uses an AI system such as a voice-controlled digital sales assistant, the business’s sales representative has more time to focus on sales. From managing leads in a pipeline to improving forecasting, a digital assistant takes care of data management. A digital assistant not only provides you with more data but also ensures that the data entry is timely and data accuracy is higher. By eliminating manual data entry, sales representatives are free to generate and convert more leads.

7. Close Deals Faster

With AI, you already know and target the customers of tomorrow. This information empowers sales representatives so that they can close deals faster. Bringing in AI systems for each step of sales enables a business to use predictive forecasting to get leads and target its customer base. This approach also allows a business to recognize its competitors and get headway into sales. Data handling with AI is better and more efficient than any human making the entries. The presence of data and the insights from data help develop proper sales strategies that lead to conversions.

AI systems can enhance the performance of your sales team and add a personal touch to push sales, leading to a total IT transformation. It’s all about combining human behavior and digital smarts to optimize and organize your sales processes.